Next up is Rupert Goold's sensational Romeo and Juliet. But are New Yorkers aware of the play's deeply offensive sexual content? Referring to Juliet, Lady Capulet explicitly tells us "she's not 14". But the production, faithfully following Shakespeare, makes it clear that Juliet not only marries Romeo spiritually but engages in acts of a sexual nature with him. It's hard to see how any decent, law-abiding community can possibly sanction a play that endorses sex between an adolescent boy and a 13-year-old girl: something that will surely inflame the imaginations of any Humbert Humberts in the audience.

But it gets worse as the season continues. King Lear not only has the temerity to suggest that there is little moral distinction between judges and thieves, but depicts the downright cruelty of daughters to fathers, and even shows one of the characters being grotesquely blinded. Such actions may be legitimate in cinema or video nasties but they surely have no place on the New York stage.

That isn't even the end of it. Ursine protection leagues are already up in arms about the suggestion in The Winter's Tale that bears are voraciously aggressive creatures capable of devouring innocent human beings: I've been exclusively told that the RSC, however, has stoutly resisted calls for Antigonus to exit pursued by a toy mouse. But the final straw comes with the climactic production of Julius Caesar, a play that shows an act of political assassination and the horrifying consequences. Given America's long history of attempts on the lives of its presidents, the play can only be seen as a way of undermining authority and inciting trigger-happy malcontents lurking on the fringes of American society – or indeed in row P. Given the provocative and deeply disturbing content of Shakespeare's plays, it would seem simplest for the RSC to abandon its New York season and head for the safety of home.